Re: Fox TV/Radio Simulcasts (Was: Re: Bob Katzen, WMRE)

["A. Joseph Ross" <lawyer@world.std.com>]

On 17 Mar 99,  MikeHemeon@aol.com wrote:

> << I remember that Senator Ted Kennedy opposed the
>  granting of a waiver that would allow Murdoch to own
>  both Ch. 25 and the Boston Herald. >>
> 
> Wasn't this what lost the original Channel 5 it's license??

Not quite.  At that time, it was OK for a newspaper to own a radio 
station, and the FCC granted the old Boston Herald Traveler the license 
for Channel 5, knowing that it was a newspaper and that it also owned 
WHDH and WHDH-FM.  Needless to say, the Globe wasn't happy 
about that.  Eventually, the license award was set aside after it was 
revealed that the publisher of the Herald Traveler had lunch with the 
chairman of the FCC while the application was pending.  They say they 
didn't discuss the application, and nobody had any evidence that they 
did, but it was enough to get the proceeding reopened.

So a new competitive hearing was held, and the FCC decided that the 
competing application's promise was better than WHDH's record.  
Then the thing went through the courts for a few years.

The legal grounds seem rather flimsy to me at best, and I've always 
thought (just my speculation, I have no evidence one way or the other) 
that party politics played a role in this.  The Herald-Traveler was the 
newspaper voice of the Massachusetts Republican Party.  The Globe 
was (and is) a liberal paper, which in those days had a reputation of 
being close to the Kennedys (and to some extent still has).

The license was granted in the 1950s, by an Eisenhower-appointed 
FCC.  It was set aside by a Kennedy-appointed FCC, and the award to 
WHDH's competitor was made by a Johnson-appointed FCC.  After 
that, the case was in the courts, where administrative decisions are 
given a certain deference and where partisan politics is less present.  I'm 
sure the Nixon administration would have tried to help the Herald-
Traveler if they could, but by that time, it was out of their hands.


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 A.Joseph Ross, J.D.                                 617.367.0468
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